About

The aim of the research is to analyse visual arts magazines produced in the UK between 1960 and 2000 which specifically attend to the work of Black artists and for which the editorial and publishing process was controlled primarily by people of colour. By taking the periodicals as the object of study in their own right, I aim to critically examine the role of independent publishing as fostering new debates, positions and understandings of how visual arts intersect with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and the legacies of colonialism. I will argue that these magazines were co-constitutive with a succession of Black British art movements, in several cases providing the conditions for artistic practices to emerge. By reading the artworks and magazines together, we can gain a richer understanding of the broader ecology of Black British cultural production. In the current context of renewed engagement with decolonisation and re-examining previously marginalised histories, this research has significant cultural urgency.

To understand the changing historiography of Black British art, I will produce a documents-based analysis, which is attentive to properties of magazines such as their seriality, multiple authorship, design, para-textual features and their dialogic relationship with audiences. By contextualising the magazines within varied print cultures including artists’ publications, Black radical publishing and the mainstream art press, I will evaluate their importance in remapping and ‘reworlding’ British art history. The magazines are also of great social, cultural and political importance, for example providing unique documentation of the first Black British collective of writers and artists or one of the earliest autobiographical accounts of British Muslim lesbian identity. The research will illuminate larger cultural struggles over the politics of representation and the explore the extent to which print media provide a key site of contestation.